Intimate Image Abuse and Sextortion — How It Works and What Support Exists

Two distinct but related online harms have grown significantly in the last decade. Understanding what each involves — and how they differ — is the starting point for understanding how law and support services respond to them.

Non-consensual intimate image sharing (NCII)

NCII — sometimes called 'revenge porn', though that term is widely considered inaccurate and misleading — refers to the sharing of intimate or sexual images of a person without their consent. The image itself may have been taken consensually (for example, shared privately between partners) or non-consensually (through hacking, spyware, or hidden recording). What makes the act harmful is not how the image was originally obtained but that it is distributed without the person's agreement.

The term 'revenge porn' implies a motive of personal revenge, usually by a former partner. In reality, images are shared for many different reasons and by many different people — strangers, acquaintances, and criminal networks — and the word 'porn' implies the content is pornographic in intent, which adds further stigma to people who are victims of an offence. 'Non-consensual intimate image abuse' (NCII abuse) is the term now preferred by most support organisations and legal frameworks.

Sextortion

Sextortion refers to a form of blackmail in which intimate images are used — or threatened to be used — as leverage to coerce someone into paying money, providing further images, or engaging in other conduct they would not otherwise agree to. The images may have been obtained through deception (for example, someone posing as a romantic interest online and persuading a person to share intimate photos), through hacking, or may not exist at all (the threat alone can be the mechanism).

Sextortion differs from NCII in that the primary harm is extortion rather than the act of sharing itself. However, the two often overlap: threats to share images are sextortion, and if those threats are carried out the harm becomes NCII as well.

How these harms typically occur

Several patterns appear consistently in reported cases. In trust-based scenarios, images are shared privately — often within a relationship — and later used as leverage or shared more widely when the relationship breaks down. In catfishing scenarios, someone creates a false online identity to build what appears to be a genuine romantic relationship, then uses that relationship to obtain intimate images which are subsequently weaponised. In hacking scenarios, intimate images stored on devices, cloud storage, or messaging platforms are accessed without the person's knowledge or consent. Criminal gang operations — a pattern that has grown significantly — involve networks, sometimes based internationally, that systematically target individuals using scripted approaches at scale, often with financial extortion as the primary objective.

Scale

The scale of these harms is significant and growing. The Revenge Porn Helpline UK recorded 22,275 reports in 2024, a 20.9% increase on 2023 and the highest figure since the service launched in 2015. In 2023, reports to the Helpline increased by 106% compared to 2022, with sextortion accounting for 34% of all reports received (Revenge Porn Helpline / SWGfL, 2024 Annual Report). In the United States, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received nearly 55,000 reports related to sextortion and extortion in 2024, with reported losses totalling $33.5 million — a 59% increase in report volume compared to 2023 (FBI IC3, 2024). Between October 2021 and March 2023 alone, the FBI and Homeland Security received over 13,000 reports of financial sextortion of minors, involving at least 12,600 victims (FBI, 2023).

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) — which focuses specifically on child sexual abuse imagery, including self-generated material involving minors — confirmed 275,652 webpages containing child sexual abuse imagery in 2023, with 92% of that imagery categorised as self-generated, meaning children were targeted, groomed, or coerced into producing it (IWF Annual Report 2023). Where minors are involved in NCII, different and more serious legal frameworks apply — described further in the following pages.